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GREs > Social Psychology (Psychology Subject) > Flashcards

Social Psychology (Psychology Subject) Flashcards

1
Q

Social psychology

A

*the study of how people relate to and influence each other
- uses experimental method to study individuals

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2
Q

Norman Triplett

A
  • conducted the first official social psychology type experiment in 1897 on social facilitation
    — cyclists performed better paced by others than alone
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3
Q

Kurt Lewin

A
  • founder of the field of social psychology
  • Gestalt ideas to social behavior
  • conceived field theory
    — the total of influences upon individual behavior
  • a person’s life space
    — the collection of forces upon the individual
  • valence, vector, and barrier are forces in the life space
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4
Q

Fritz Heider

A
  • attribution theory
    — the study of how people infer the causes of others’ behavior; people attribute intentions/emotions to anything
  • balance theory
    — the study of how people make their feelings/actions consistent to preserve psychological homeostasis
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5
Q

Actor-observer attributional divergence

A

*the tendency for the person performing the behavior to have a different perspective on the situation than the person watching the behavior

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6
Q

Self-serving attributional bias

A

*interpreting one’s own actions and motives in a positive way
- blaming situations for failures and taking credit for successes
- “better than average” mentality

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7
Q

Illusory correlation

A

*assuming that two unrelated things have a relationship

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8
Q

Slippery slope

A

*logical fallacy that says a small, insignificant first step in one direction will lead to greater steps that will eventually have a significant impact

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9
Q

Hindsight bias

A

*believing after the fact that you knew all along

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10
Q

Halo effect

A

*thinking that if someone has one good quality then he has only good qualities

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11
Q

Self-fulfilling prophecy

A

*when one’s expectations somehow draw out, or cause, the very behavior that’s expected

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12
Q

False consensus bias

A

*assuming most other people think as you do

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13
Q

Lee Ross

A
  • studied subjects who were first made to believe a statement and then later told it was false
  • subjects continued to believe the statement if they had processed it and devised their own logical explanation
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14
Q

Richard Nisbett

A
  • showed that we lack awareness for why we do what we do
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15
Q

Base-rate fallacy

A

*overestimating the general frequency of things we’re most familiar with

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16
Q

M. J. Lerner’s just world bias

A

*the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people
- uncomfortable for people to accept that bad things happen to good people, so they blame the victim

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17
Q

Ellen Langer

A
  • studied the illusion of control
    — belief that you can control things you actually have no influence on
  • the driving force behind manipulating the lottery, gambling, and superstition
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18
Q

Oversimplification

A

*the tendency to make simple explanations for complex events
- people hold onto original ideas about cause even when new factors emerge

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19
Q

Representativeness heuristic

A

*using shortcut about typical assumptions to guess at an answer rather than relying on logic

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20
Q

Availability heuristic

A

*people think there is a higher proportion of one thing in a group than there really is because examples of that one thing comes to mind more easily

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21
Q

Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory

A
  • it’s uncomfortable for people to have beliefs that don’t match their actions
  • after making difficult decision, people are motivated to back their actions up by touting corresponding beliefs
  • the less the act is justified by circumstance, the more we feel the need to justify it by bringing our attitude in line with the behavior
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22
Q

Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory

A
  • alternative explanation to cognitive dissonance
  • when people are unsure of their beliefs, they take their cues from their own behavior
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23
Q

Overjustification effect

A
  • tendency to assume that we must not want to do things that we’re paid/compensated to do
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24
Q

Gain-loss theory

A
  • people act in order to obtain gain and avoid loss
  • people favor situations that start out negatively but end positively
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25
Q

Social exchange theory

A
  • humans interact in ways that maximize reward and minimize costs
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26
Q

Self-presentation

A
  • we act in ways that are in line with our attitudes or will be accepted by others
  • important influence on behavior
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27
Q

Self-monitoring

A

*the process by which people pay close attention to their actions
- as a result, people change their behaviors to be more favorable

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28
Q

Impression management

A

*behaving in ways that might make a good impression

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29
Q

Social facilitation

A

*tendency for the presence of others to enhance/hinder performance
- Robert Zajonc found presence of others helps with easy tasks but hinders complex tasks

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30
Q

Social comparison

A

*evaluating one’s own actions, abilities, opinions, ideas by comparing with others
- used as an argument against mainstreaming
- children with difficulties in class with regular children may result in lower self-esteem for problematic kid

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31
Q

Role

A

*set of behavior norms that seem suitable for a particular person

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32
Q

Morton Deutsch

A
  • prisoner’s dilemma and trucking company game story to illustrate struggle between cooperation and competition
  • lack of trust leads to more competition
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33
Q

Equity theory

A

*idea that people feel most comfortable in situations in which rewards and punishments are equal, fitting, or highly logical
- overbenefited people tend to feel guilty
- random or illogical punishments make people anxious

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34
Q

Stanley Milgram’s stimulus-overload theory

A
  • explains why urbanites are less prosocial than country folk
  • urbanites don’t need any more interaction
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35
Q

Reciprocal interaction

A

*the constant exchange of influences between people
- a constant factor in behavior

36
Q

Conformity

A

*going with real or perceived group pressure
- compliance (publicly, not privately)
- acceptance (change actions + beliefs to conform)
- dissenter (individual who speaks out against the majority)

37
Q

An individual is most likely to conform when:

A
  • there’s a majority opinion
  • the majority has a unanimous position
  • majority has high status, or individual is concerned with own status
  • situation is in public
  • individual was not previously committed to another position
  • individual has low self-esteem
  • individual scores high on a measure of authoritarianism
38
Q

Reactance

A

*refusal to conform that may occur as a result of a blatant attempt to control
- people will often not conform if they’re forewarned that others will attempt to change them

39
Q

Stanley Milgram’s teacher and learner experiment

A
  • “teacher” ordered to administer painful electric shocks to “learner”
  • conditions facilitating conformity include remoteness of the victim, proximity of experimenter/commander, a legitimate-seeming commander, and conformity of other subjects
40
Q

Philip Zimbardo

A
  • people wearing hoods (and so deindividuated) more willing to administer higher levels of shock than people without hoods
  • prison simulation experiments
    — people willing to step into surprising roles
41
Q

Solomon Asch

A
  • subjects listened to the staged “opinion” of others
  • subjects conformed to incorrect opinion of others
  • unanimity seemed to be influential factor
42
Q

Muzafer Sherif

A
  • peoples’ descriptions of autokinetic effect were influenced by others’ descriptions
43
Q

Individual speaker most likely to change a listener’s attitude if:

A
  • the speaker is an expert and/or trustworthy
  • similar to the listener
  • acceptable to the listener
  • overheard rather than obviously trying to influence
  • the content is anecdotal, emotional, or shocking
  • speaker is part of a two-person debate rather than a one-sided argument
44
Q

R. E. Petty and J. T. Cacioppo’s elaboration likelihood model of persuasion

A
  • people very involved in an issue listen to strengths of arguments in the issue rather than more superficial factors, like characteristics of the speaker
45
Q

Sleeper effect

A
  • explains why persuasive communication from a source of low credibility may become more acceptable after the fact
46
Q

McGuire’s inoculation theory

A
  • people’s beliefs are vulnerable if they’ve never faced a challenge
  • once experiencing a challenge to their opinions, they’re less vulnerable
  • challenge is like a vaccination
47
Q

Deindividuation

A
  • individual identity or accountability is de-emphasized
  • may result from mingling in a crowd, wearing uniforms, or otherwise adopting a larger group identity
48
Q

The Kitty Genovese case

A

*murder of a woman witnessed by scores of people
- led to investigation of the bystander effect
— why people are less likely to help when others are present

49
Q

Diffusion of responsibility

A

*tendency that the larger the group, the less likely individuals in the group will act/take responsibility
- everyone waits for someone else to act, result of deindividuation

50
Q

Social loafing

A

*tendency to work less hard in a group as the result of diffusion of responsibility
- it’s guarded against when each individual is closely monitored

51
Q

Philip Zimbardo

A
  • antisocial behavior positively correlates with population density
52
Q

Group conflict

A
  • competition for scarce resources causes conflict in a group
  • Muzafer Sherif showed that win/lose game-type competition triggers conflict
    Sherif’s Robbers’ cave experiment (a study about prejudice) showed group conflict is most effectively overcome by need for cooperative attention to a higher superordinate goal
53
Q

Contact and conflict

A

Contact with opposing party decreases conflict; we fear what we do not know

54
Q

Group polarization

A
  • studied by James Stoner
  • concept that group discussion serves to strengthen the already dominant point of view
  • explains the risky shift, or why groups will take greater risks than individuals
55
Q

Groupthink

A
  • studied by Irving Janis
  • likely to occur in a group that has unquestioned beliefs, pressure to conform, invulnerability, censors, cohesiveness within, isolation from without, and a strong leader
56
Q

Pluralistic ignorance

A

*most people in a group privately disagree with something but incorrectly believe that most people in the group agree with it

57
Q

Kenneth and Mamie Clark

A
  • conducted doll preference studies
  • demonstrated negative effects that group segregation had on African-American children’s self-esteem
  • African-American children thought the white dolls were better
58
Q

Ingroup/outgroup bias

A

*individuals in one group think their members have more positive qualities and fewer negative qualities than members of the other group even though the qualities are the same in each
- the basis for prejudice

59
Q

We’re attracted to people who:

A
  • are near us, because we got a chance to know them (propinquity)
  • physically attractive
  • attitudes similar to our own
  • like us back (reciprocity)
60
Q

Opposites do not attract

A

the old saying is just talk, according to research

61
Q

Reciprocity of disclosure

A

*sharing secrets/feelings
- facilitates emotional closeness

62
Q

Excitation-transfer theory

A
  • sometimes we attribute our excitement/physiological arousal about one thing to something else
  • I.e., thinking we like our date more than we do while bungee jumping
63
Q

Mere-exposure effect

A

*how stimuli are rated
- the more we see/experience something, the more positively we rate it

64
Q

Richard Lazarus

A
  • studied stress and coping
  • problem-focused coping (changing the stressor)
  • emotion-focused coping (changing our response to a stressor)
65
Q

Objective self-awareness

A
  • achieved through self-perception, high self-monitoring, internality, and self-efficacy
  • deindividuation would work against objective self-awareness
66
Q

Door-in-the-face

A

*a sales tactic in which people ask for more than they would ever get and then “settle” for less (the realistic amount hoped for)

67
Q

Foot-in-the-door phenomenon

A

*doing a small favor makes people more willing to do larger ones later

68
Q

Social support network

A
  • … effects on mental health have emerged an area of study that combines social and clinical ideas
69
Q

J. Rodin and E. Langer

A
  • nursing home residents who have plants to care for have better health and lower mortality rates
70
Q

Bogus pipeline

A

*an instrument that measures physiological reactions in order to measure the truthfulness of attitude self-reporting

71
Q

Peter principle

A

*the concept that people are promoted at work until they reach a position of incompetence, the position in which they remain

72
Q

Stuart Valins

A
  • studied environmental influences on behavior
  • architecture matters
    — students in long-corridor dorms feel more stressed and withdrawn than in suite-style dorms
73
Q

Leonard Berkowitz’s frustration-aggression hypothesis

A
  • posits a relationship between frustration in achieving a goal (no matter how small) and the show of aggression
74
Q

M. Rokeach

A
  • studied racial bias and the similarity of beliefs
  • people prefer like-minded people > like-skinned people
  • racial bias decreases as attitude similarity between people increases
75
Q

M. Fischbein and I. Ajzen

A
  • known for their theory of reasoned action
    — people’s behavior in a given situation is determined by their attitude about the situation and social norms
76
Q

Cross-cultural research

A
  • revolves around determining whether Western ways of conceptualizing/behaving are the same as the ways of other cultures
  • Hazel Markus found Eastern countries value interdependence over independence (Western)
    — interdependence = Japan; individuals more likely to demonstrate conformity, modesty and pessimism
    — independence = U.S.; individuals more likely to show optimism, self-enhancement, and individuality
77
Q

Attitude

A

*a positive, negative, or neutral evaluation of a person, issue, or object

78
Q

Elaine Hatfield

A
  • passionate love (intense longing for the union with another and a state of profound physiological arousal)
    — based on a biophysiological system shared with other primates
    — a powerful emotion that can be both positive (reciprocal) and negative (unrequited)
  • companionate love (affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined)
    — achieved via mutual trust, respect, commitment
    — often characterizes later stages of relationships
79
Q

Paul Ekman

A
  • 6 basic emotions: sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust
  • Facial Action Coding System (FACS coding) used by researchers to code facial expressions for emotion
    — helps with shit like determine whether a smile is genuine
80
Q

Reciprocal socialization

A

*two parties (i.e., parents and children) adapt to/are socialized by each other
- I.e., parents learn new slang picked up from children; children learn to respect rules/traditions

81
Q

Harold Kelley

A
  • attributions we make about our actions/those of others are usually accurate
  • based on the consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus of the action
82
Q

Industrial/organizational psychology (I/O psychology)

A

*branch of psychology that deals with the workplace
- work to increase an organization’s efficiency and functionality by improving the performance and well-being of the people in the organization

83
Q

Walter Dill Scott

A
  • one of the first people to apply psychology principles to business; employed psychological principles in advertising
  • helped the military implement psychological testing to aid with personnel selection
84
Q

Henry Landsberger

A
  • Hawthorne effect
  • people’s performance changes when they’re being observed
85
Q

Muzafer Sherif

A
  • Robbers Cave Experiments
    — how easily in-groups and out-groups can form
    — revealed strategies for conflict resolution
86
Q

Sociotechnical systems

A

*a method of work design that acknowledges the interaction between people and technology in the workplace

87
Q

Sunk cost

A

*an expense that has been incurred and cannot be recovered
- best strategy is to ignore these when making decisions, because money that has already been spent is irrelevant to the future

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